Interesting blog post by @hirodusk about "ephemeralization", doing "more and more with less and less":

Paul Graham’s essay on tablets referenced a fascinating term I hadn’t heard before: “ephemeralization.” Wikipedia describes it as “the ability of technological advancement to do ‘more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing’.” An example: video playback technology Fifty years ago, the only option for watching video was an entire movie theater, with a huge projector fixed in place, and film reels the size of barrels for a single movie. The 1980s gave us VCRs and VHS tapes: a playback device that you could carry with two hands and that offered more features than a movie theater (like pause, fast forward, and rewind); the tapes were small enough that you could keep a reasonably sized movie library on your bookshelf. In the 1990s we got DVD players and DVDs, shrinking the playback device yet smaller, shrinking the movie media (tapes -> D...